Tag Archives: AdWords

Mar 17

As the old saying goes, “be careful for what you wish for; you may receive it” is something that holds very true in today’s world, especially when it involves the Click Through Rate of your AdWords account.

In a recent article, we discussed the new Added By AdWords testing going on and Google’s assertion that these ads would help improve performance by 5%-15%. While they did not specifically state the scope of metrics this applies to, our suspicion is that this is related to Click-through Rate.

While Click-through Rate is an important aspect to look at, as it is one of the major factors that helps determine Quality Score (improving this can decrease your Cost per Click), your ultimate focus as an advertiser needs to be on generating additional business for yourself, not Google.

Sometimes what is good for Google (higher click through rate) isn’t necessarily going to lead to beneficial results (improved Conversion Rate) on your end. For example, Dynamic Keyword Insertion helps adjust the headline of your ads to match the search that someone conducted. While we see many cases where this helps to improve Click through Rates, many of these cases have led to lower Conversion Rates.

While consideration to Quality Score impact needs to be seriously evaluated before taking this step, there are occasional instances where undermining your Click-through Rate can actually help your business. One case we ran into in the past involved a B2B client that was focused on higher scale projects.

Initially, the Click-through Rate for this client’s traffic was high but the quality of leads coming in was not. In this case, the solution we came up with was to pre-qualify people within the ad (by saying that the client would only take projects at a certain dollar amount or over).

This had an immediate impact on account performance. In Google’s eyes, overall performance went in the tank as the Click-through Rate of these ads saw a significant decline. In the Client’s eyes, AdWords performance improved substantially as the quality of sales leads he received improved.

The takeaway out of all of this is that discretion needs to be exercised before making changes that fall in line with what Google recommends because the adjustments that benefit them do not necessarily benefit you as the advertiser.